Nvidia posts quarterly results, revenue down 42% with $201M net loss

Time is the great revealer. We now know why Nvidia’s CEO, Jenj-Hsun Huang, was quick to denounce Intel’s April 14th proclamation during the company’s Q1 financial release, that Intel had seen a bottom in the global recession and that things were turning around.

For the 2010 fiscal quarter ending April 26, 2009, Nvidia saw revenues of $664.2 million, compared to $1.2 billion for the year-ago period; a decline of 42%. The company incurred a one-time charge of $140.2 million in previously announced employee stock option purchases, and would up with a net loss of $201.3 million for the quarter, which is $0.37 per share.

While revenue increased 38% from 4Q’09 to 1Q’10, inventory was reduced from 144 days’ supply to 64 days. Nvidia increased its desktop market share during the quarter, growing from 63% to 69%, according to the Mercury Research PC Graphics Report 2009.

Nvidia included some recent milestones in their financial disclosure:

Acer’s Ion-powered AspireRevo, which is “no larger than a typical hardcover book”, and is “a fully capable desktop with advanced graphics and impressive multimedia features”, which was just reviewed by Engaget a week or so back

Its OpenCL driver and software development kit, as well as its commitment and early access program for developers.

DirectX 11 compute abilities demonstrated on Windows 7.

Tegra 600 series computer-on-a-chip that “enables always-on, always connected HD netbook that can go days between battery charges” — showing the power of ARM-based solutions, compared with Intel’s Atom-based solutions, for example.

Harvard was recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence for its academic schedule whereby students are taught how to use GPU-compute for applications development in the science and engineering research projects.

Nvidia’s stock price has dropped nearly 14% since the news, and now sits at $9.25, down 13.79%.

The news is not very surprising because the DRAM and CPU segments are definitely in a different market than GPU segments. There are lots of video options out there and during times of financial duress, people might need to buy a notebook or desktop machine, but they may not need highest-end graphics at the moment.

Nvidia’s continued market share growth indicates how hard AMD/ATI is taking it at the present time. AMD posted a $416 million loss for its first quarter on $1.2 billion in revenue, which included its entire line of server, desktop and “mobile” (low-wattage) CPUs. Nvidia’s $664.2 million in revenue was almost entirely in the area of GPUs and GP-GPU-based compute boards. Of the two, AMD/ATI is likely hurting more.